One Mom's Quest to become an Author

MOMA

What a phrase: so much more poetic then categorically perfect. Flaws tell a story. Flaws show me life well lived, well loved. These hands featured below tell me a story. They belong to an artist, a woman who worked hard her whole life. She was a woman who cried and laughed without hesitation; and let herself be vulnerable to all the hurts that are out there for us to feel.

Louise Bourgeois 2010

These hands, these vein ridden, arthritic, sun spotted hands belong to French artist Louise Bourgeois. Born in 1913, Louise was the daughter of Parisians couple Josephine and Louis. Together they ran a tapestry restoration workshop. Early on, Louise showed great promise in the workshop and was utilized to help draw missing elements depicted by the tapestries. Louise was a gifted student, but her art was greatly affected by her father’s affair with the family governess. This deeply troubling and ultimately defining betrayal remained a vivid memory for the rest of her life. Coupled with abuse from an indifferent father, she learned quickly to keep her own counsel.

She began to study Math at the Sorbonne at a young age, but upon losing her mother young, switched her field of study to art. Her father was outraged and refused to finance her education, forcing her to seek scholarship elsewhere and take classes only when she could afford them.

If her early work shows a focus on painting and print work, the 1940s show a shift towards sculpture. Marrying American art historian, Robert Goldwater, provided her with a reason to move to New York. A gap in 1950s and 1960s show a break from art where Bourgeois immersed herself for a time in psychoanalysis and she came back in 1964 with a new aesthetic. Instead of the wooden totems from earlier exhibitions, she presented strange, organically plastic sculptures.

By alternating between forms, materials, and scales and veering between figuring and abstraction became a bigger part of Bourgeois’s vision, even as she probed the same theme: loneliness, jealousy, anger, and fear. In 1982 Bourgeois took center stage at MOMA.

Louise Bourgeois died in her home in 2010 at the age of 98. She said, “Art in a guarantee of sanity.” Bourgeois used her art to work through her abusive childhood. She looked deep inside and found her story. Credited with founding the so-called confessional art. Louise lived her life and her art through a lifetime in introspection and vulnerability. Louise lived a genuine and gorgeously flawed life. Her hands tell her story.

What story do your flaws tell? Join us here www.queenauthorsquest. Register at the bottom of the page and give an email and a user name. Wordpress will send you a link to add a password and you can log in from there. You will get weekly reminders when I post. Don’t be shy, I love new members!!